The topics in this series were developed by New Scientist in association with the Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences in Sydney, Australia, to celebrate its Egyptian Mummies: Exploring Ancient Lives exhibition. This article was paid for by MAAS and commissioned and edited independently by New Scientist

In 1821, London was in the grip of mummy mania. All of Europe had become fascinated by Ancient Egypt thanks to Napoleon Bonaparte’s attempt to conquer the country in 1798. Napoleon had failed but his army went home with tales of the marvellous things they had seen. Prompted by reports of tombs, temples and monumental statues, a steady stream of travellers went in search of Egypt’s vanished civilisation. Not all were content to admire pyramids and ruins: they wanted souvenirs — and high on the shopping list was a mummy, the preserved corpse of one of the mysterious people who lived at the time of the pharaohs. Hundreds of mummies eventually ended up in private collections and museums.

Soon, unwrapping mummies had become a popular form of entertainment: wealthy collectors invited friends over for “unrollings”, while the more entrepreneurial hired a hall and sold tickets. Spectators paid for the thrill of seeing precious jewels and amulets emerge from the bandages, rather than to gawp at the body within. But in 1821, away from the public gaze, London surgeon Augustus Granville carried out his own unrolling with a different aim. He spent six weeks performing what was, at the time, the most thorough autopsy ever carried out on a mummy.

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As Granville later reported to the Royal Society, the body belonged to a woman of around 50 who had borne children, grown fat and died from ovarian cancer. He also concluded that his mummy had been immersed in warm beeswax and bitumen as part of the embalming process. The autopsy was groundbreaking. Yet Granville had serious qualms about what he had done. He recognised that in his search for knowledge, he had destroyed something wonderful.

With another two centuries of accumulated knowledge, Egyptologists have reconstructed many aspects of ancient Egyptian life and culture, helped by a wealth of texts written on papyri and the walls of tombs and temples. Most texts are formal and say little about ordinary life, however. Even inscriptions and portraits on coffins mislead by flattering the dead. Intact mummies are a repository of information on those aspects of life about which the texts say nothing. They can tell us how well or poorly people ate, the state of their health, how long they lived and sometimes what eventually killed them. They can tell us that a man portrayed on his coffin as young and healthy was middle-aged and overweight with bad teeth and clogged-up arteries. They can also provide data that help build a picture of the wider population, from the diseases people were exposed to and the prevalence of some genetic disorders to changing fashions in burial practices – and even hairstyles.

Under the bandages

For most of the 19th century, the only way to study mummies was to unwrap them, a process that usually led to serious damage and sometimes destruction. To make matters worse, most “unrollings” produced little useful knowledge. “Many unwrappings were crude and motivated by curiosity, providing little information,” says Daniel Antoine, curator of physical anthropology at the British Museum’s Institute for Bioarchaeology in London. Even the most meticulous investigations produced questionable results. Recent research on what was left of Granville’s mummy suggests her ovarian tumour was benign and that she probably died from tuberculosis – and Granville was way off track about how she had been preserved.

Unwrapping mummies in the Boulak Museum, Cairo

Bettmann/Getty

The turn of the 20th century saw a more scientific approach, sparked by discoveries in the Valley of the Kings and the necropolis at Deir el-Bahri. In Cairo, renowned Australian anatomist and anthropologist Grafton Elliot Smith unwrapped a number of royal mummies and dissected several priests, publishing valuable information on their ages at death and their health. Pioneering palaeopathologist Marc Armand Ruffer and British chemist Alfred Lucas, who worked in Cairo at the same time, developed techniques for rehydrating and examining tissue and analysing the substances used by embalmers.

Unwrappings continued well into the 20th century, although they were increasingly rare. This was largely thanks to a new and non-destructive means of looking under the wrappings. X-rays were discovered in 1895, and just months later German physicist Walter Koenig tested the technology on a mummified Egyptian child. Elliot Smith wasn’t far behind, taking the Pharaoh Thutmose IV by horse-drawn cab to a local nursing home – then the only place in Cairo with an X-ray machine. The advent of portable X-ray machines made the process more practicable and by the 1960s hundreds of mummies had been scanned. The British Museum, which holds the largest collection of mummies outside Egypt, and had never allowed any to be unwrapped – now had most of them X-rayed.

“X-ray images did produce some useful information,” says Antoine. Some revealed broken bones, signs of osteoarthritis, missing teeth, even evidence of parasitic worms. Some revealed packages of mummified organs pushed inside the body cavity or laid out on the corpse before wrapping. Many showed the shadowy shapes of amulets, placed to protect key parts of the body from spirits or to encourage healing of incisions made during embalming.

X-rays had their drawbacks. Created by projecting a single beam of radiation through the mummy, the images were often fuzzy, with key features obscured. And not everything was always as it seemed. “You often see broken bones but you can’t tell from an X-ray whether it was broken in life or after death during the embalming process,” says Antoine.

Ancient murder mystery

X-rays made one thing very clear: mummies had more secrets to give up. And it wasn’t long before a tool emerged that would allow researchers to delve even deeper into the lives of ancient Egypt’s dead. Developed in the 1970s, computerised tomography also uses X-rays, but the source rotates around the body. The result is a series of detailed two-dimensional slices, which can be combined to create 3D images of the body under the wrappings.

In the past 20 years, this technology has improved dramatically. The latest dual-energy scanners use two sources of X-rays of different wavelengths, generating thousands of slices and images of astonishing clarity. With today’s state-of-the-art graphics software, data from CT scans can now be transformed into virtual mummies that can be explored in minute detail. “We can virtually lift bandages from the skin and virtually remove objects inserted by the embalmers. We can peel skin away from muscles and lift the muscles to view the skeleton,” says Antoine. It’s now possible to home in on details of interest, such as the inside of an artery, a previously invisible inscription on an amulet or the amount of wear on the hidden face of a bone.

“This technology provides as accurate a picture as science currently allows. It gets us as close to the truth as it’s possible to get.”

These scans are giving us the most detailed picture yet of health in ancient Egypt. One recent CT study showed that atheromas – calcified deposits in the arteries – were relatively common, suggesting that cardiovascular disease is not a modern affliction after all. Many mummies have lines showing a change in density at the ends of their long bones. These are known as Harris lines and they indicate periods of arrested growth caused by illness or hunger.

“We can virtually lift bandages from the skin and virtually remove objects inserted by the embalmers. We can peel skin away from muscles and lift the muscles to view the skeleton”

Establishing cause of death remains tricky, however. In a rare case of certainty, the British Museum recently learned that one of its oldest mummies died a violent death. Gebelein Man A, whose body mummified naturally after burial in the desert near Thebes some 5500 years ago, has a visible wound on his skin. With a virtual version of the mummy, Antoine and his colleagues could peer through the hole and see damage to the shoulder blade and the rib beneath, evidence of a deep stab wound. “He’d been on display for more than a century, yet no one had any idea he had been murdered,” says Antoine.

Make a living preparing the dead

In other cases, even where there are signs of serious disease, it’s hard to be sure that’s what caused death. “We have seen cases of dental disease that are so bad they could have led to fatal septicaemia and symptoms of cardiovascular disease that could have caused a stroke or a heart attack – but we can’t say for sure these were what killed them,” says Antoine.

The latest 3D visualisations are also helping tease out details of the embalming process, as well as revealing something about the people who made a living preparing the dead for the next world. “We know the main steps, but evidence from the bodies will allow us to refine our knowledge,” says Marie Vandenbeusch, a curator in the British Museum’s department of Ancient Egypt and Sudan.

If the deceased had lost a leg, or even a toe, embalmers fitted prosthetics. If they had been well-fleshed in life, the embalmer sometimes padded the dried corpse with folded linen to restore its shape. And, unsurprisingly, things sometimes went wrong. Padiamenet, a temple doorkeeper from Thebes who lived around 700 BC, suffered the ultimate indignity – his head fell off during the embalming process. In an attempt to make him whole again, the embalmers fixed his head back onto his body with a pair of poles.

What more can we hope to find out about the mummies? “What we can learn now was impossible 20 years ago and we don’t know what more we might be able to do in another 20 years time,” says Antoine.

For now, patience is the key, says Vandenbeusch. “Our predecessors refused to allow any of the museum’s mummies to be unrolled so they remain intact. The information is still there to be had. For now we must wait for science and technology to advance.”

How modern science peers further beneath wrappings

Imaging and virtual reconstruction is the gold standard for investigating mummies without damaging them. But more invasive methods that require small amounts of soft tissue can produce vital information we can’t obtain by other means.

Minute samples rehydrated, thinly sliced and examined under a microscope have revealed the presence of parasites and pathogens, identified cases of sand pneumoconiosis – a condition caused by breathing in desert sand – emphysema and scarring of the heart wall caused by a heart attack. Other techniques, such as high-performance chromatography, can pick up chemical signatures of infection, such as molecules from pathogens.

Earlier this year Australian and Italian researchers even made the first foray into the field of proteomics, when they produced a complete inventory of the proteins in samples of mummified skin and muscle. They identified proteins linked to inflammation and the body’s immune response, as well as those linked to bacterial infection in the lungs and a tumour suppressor that suggested the presence of pancreatic cancer.

Another tool, which has had a lot of publicity in recent years, is DNA analysis. In theory, this could answer many longstanding questions about the origins of the ancient Egyptians, their changing ethnic mix and patterns of migration, as well as confirming the parentage and family links of royal mummies.

However, in practice, DNA extraction and analysis is fraught with difficulties. It breaks down quickly at high temperatures and there are doubts about whether the human DNA isolated from mummies is genuine or the result of contamination by modern humans. The hope is that next generation sequencing will make it possible to reconstruct DNA from tiny fragments and make it easier to detect contamination.